Disclaimer: I do hereby disclaim all rights and responsibilities for the characters in this collection. Kudos to Bryke, indeed.
Word Count: 521
Author's Notes: 4/7/13. 5K went wonderfully! I even beat my personal record. ;) (Too bad I won't be writing any PR for a little while, haha.) I'm on a writing marathon for That One Night, so I'll post them as they come to me.
Gifted To: miilehlo
That one night
Tahno spilled his coffee. (Part I)
"Kiss me."
"...what?"
Tahno surreptitiously cleared his throat, and took another careful sip. He stared at the words below, but they merely floated around the page.
"It's New Year's... It's bad luck if you don't."
The dark liquid burned his throat long after it had been swallowed down. It was his second cup of the day, and he really should have called it quits by now—he felt restless, jumpy, unusually alert—but he couldn't seem to stop; it gave him something else to do.
Tahno bit his cheek, glancing up.
The coffee table was stacked with all sorts of tedious things, and his intern was lounging away on the couch, squinting her entire focus into the tiny lines of a document that she held above her face. It couldn't have been comfortable.
He looked back down to his own paperwork, feeling the itch in his skin more than ever. He couldn't sit still. The styrofoam cup felt rubbery against his mouth.
"You're not going to try to hit me again, are you?"
This was a bad idea. This was a terrible idea. He had no idea what he was still doing there, or why hadn't yet bothered to shut his mouth. He was supposed to be her supervisor; she was his intern, his assistant fresh out of undergrad—the roommate of the woman he was fucking on the weekends—and according to some abstract rules of society or whatever, he was supposed to be the responsible one. She was going to have to work with this girl for the rest of the year, to keep trusting her with his life's research, to keep seeing her every day, sprawled over her couch, wearing that stupid—
"You're safe for now, I guess," she whispered through a smirk, and he could feel the wisps of breath against his lips. Her eyes were hooded, lids growing heavy. "I just wouldn't linger in any parking lots... if I were you."
Four, three—
(Fuck it.)
"No promises," he whispered back, throat thick beneath his smile; she didn't need to know all that he'd really meant by that. (Just one kiss. One kiss wouldn't hurt. What she didn't know wouldn't hurt.)
Two—
And for most of it, it was barely a kiss at all; it was the kind of kiss he could feel every millisecond along the way; the kind where he could feel the other person even before he touched them; where the electricity beforehand was so intense that the actual contact sent a jolt all the way down to his toes, all the way into his brain, curling around his spine; where the heat seared into the skin of his lips, and left an invisible mark. It lasted now more than a second or two, but he could still feel it, even after she pulled back, when their noses were just barely touching. He could still feel it, even when his focus was entirely on her eyes—still closed—and the soft sigh that escaped her amidst the cheering crowds echoing throughout the many rooms. He could still feel it, right there, because she had pulled back but not away, and—
"Hey, Profe—"
"Ah!—fuck."
